The Hashtag

I joined Facebook way before everyone did. It looked crappy and I only had 3 friends. I had Facebook before I even had Friendster. Even if I avoided joining Twitter for years, I kept on using hashtags on Facebook, even on Blackberry Messenger, to the irritation of a lot of people. They say that it has no use because hashtags are not counted or tracked on Facebook. Despite knowing the apparent uselessness of hashtags and the irritation it causes, I still used hashtags for putting a different context to my status in an effort to be witty.

A month ago, when I finally joined Twitter (to avoid some Facebook friends) and learned how hashtags worked, I felt shy to use them in the manner that I was familiar with (see photo above) because I knew that my hashtags will not be trending. Nor will other people search it to find useful and related information. When I finally did use them, I used hashtags to shamelessly promote (Ha!) my blog entries here.

Whenever people search the words #gaysharks #himym #swanqueen or #ouat, one of my tweets will pop up eventually and, hopefully, my blog entry will be read, spreading my very important thoughts across the globe. This is how powerful the hashtag is.

I'm surprised that people in, as far as, Germany read my entries.

However, while the hashtag has helped me gain a bigger audience, I resent the way it has been abused by our generation. It has been used to popularize weird...inventions such as selfies and Throwback Thursdays. Aside from the apparent narcissism, I hate selfies and throwbacks (which are, mind you, not limited to Thursdays!) because they are not necessary. Everyone can post whatever he or she likes to post on the Internet without the use of hashtags. No justification is needed to post anything. You want to post a picture of you 10 years ago. Go ahead. Do it when you please. You need not do it on a Thursday, for godssakes. You crazy people are flooding my news feed.

Not only that, the epidemic has spread to the other days of the week: i. e., #TakeBackTuesdays, #FlashbackFridays and #SteppingBackSunday. I know people will soon come up (or maybe they have but I don't know it yet) with hashtags for Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. When that happens, I believe hope the novelty will wore off and we will all go back to normal and post old pictures on any random day of the week.

When the hashtag is abused this way, it loses its power to inform people. When a person posts an old picture of, let's say, their cat and use #throwbackthursdays, and another person poses an old picture of their mom and use the same hashtag, it won't make sense because the only thing that the pictures have in common is that they were posted on a certain day of the week. And it could be really random. Twitter's edge--the ability to categorize useful information on a certain topic and make that information easily accessible to millions of people across the globe--is lost. The hashtag is now used as a tool to popularize a fad that need not be popularized because it means nothing (Who cares what you posted three or four Thursdays ago?) and it's very temporary.

Despite these setbacks to the hashtag, I still believe that the hashtag is a good and powerful tool to spread information.  Let's not abuse it.